I got the framework DIY edition from batch 6 at the beginning of this month. I assembled it and then installed Ubuntu 21.10. There were some glitches which I had to solve using other people’s solutions in this forum. But overall, I was pleased with the buy until I noticed the battery life.
I am monitoring the battery life pretty closely. The laptop is barely reaching 3 hours. I am not even doing any complex stuff - just some simple coding. This is a serious deal breaker. The whole purpose of a laptop is to be able to work when there is no way to plug in the charger. Is there something wrong with the battery that came with my machine? Or is this something other people have observed too? Is there something I can do to improve the battery life?
I just don’t think this is true. I have run several distros and made no adjustments and gotten the same 7-8 hours of battery life that early reviewers got with stock Windows 10. You can tweak both Windows and Linux to get extra battery life and in the end might get more out of Windows than Linux but if you are installing a distro and getting less than 7-8 hours then I suspect something else might be happening.
@Shaun_Kingston - with admittedly limited testing, I found that absent tuning I was in the 4-6 hour range - the range is wide as it has been a while and allowing broader margin of error. I primarily run Pop!_OS, but have manjaro and fedora installed to fiddle with and as I was considering flipping to one of them if the run time was significantly different. With tuning I’m able to eke out 7-8 hours, more if I take further measures such as disabling wifi. I’ve got a handful or terminals open, firefox with ~60 tabs open across a couple of windows, and an email client. Also, a number of gnome extensions. So I could tighten things up a bit, but I’m typically plugged in and I prefer this setup so it’s not a huge issue for me. This is on the i7-1165G7, AX210 no vPro, 64GB of ram, Sk Hynix P31 2TB with LUKS encryption and btrfs, and all four expansion slots with a USB-C card. Also, mic and camera switched off, volume at 0, and brightness one or two steps above minimum. Pipewire for sound. Battery life does not appear to be a strong suit of the machine, but it’s not an issue for my use case.
@lbkNhubert the thing that jumps out to me most about your setup is 64GB of RAM and the large number of Firefox tabs. I have just 32GB in mine and I think the reviewers had that amount or less in the review units typically. 7-8 definitely isn’t great but I mostly wanted to dispel the myth that the issues are likely to be Linux related. I think battery life would be an easy win for a future upgrade to the laptop whether from a replacement battery or a future main board.